... this album existed as a tape that i travelled round the world with... it was in my bag everywhere i went... it sat in the strangest drawers in the coldest places... somehow it managed to survive... i recorded all these songs between when i first got my 4 track recorder in 1990 up until i left dunedin and went overseas... i never recorded with any intention of putting anything out... i went through the whole process of making the music and then making the tape cover artwork, but then i never followed through with ever making any copies... a lot of this was recorded at my mums house... she must have wondered what the hell was going on in my room as these sounds leaked under the doorway... at that point i was playing music with my best friend glen and various other folks who tagged along on drunken nights up in our old practice room at vogel house in dunedin... we did a few shows here and there, at the empire and the crown... most were shambolic and forgettable, as in i can't remember much about them because of all the drinking... mostly shambolic because there were no real songs to speak of or to sing at that point... just random chords with some mumbling or screaming over the top... maybe the only song "written" on here was 'amsterdam'... i was about to go there, so i wrote about going there... seemed easy enough... 'pizza girl' was just some chords about my first ever girlfriend who left me and went to work in a pizza resturant in london... i had words but didn't feel like singing them... 'eat the meat' is glen ross singing over the top of my guitar, and he 'played' a couple of carving knives, which just added to the abattoir feel of the song... glens dad being a nightwatchman at a meatworks at the time... this song is special as it's the first and only song that we have ever recorded together... we need to do something about that actually... the rest of the songs were just me trying to be kurt cobain or tom waits or elvis or the 3D's... i can listen to these and hear where i was going... i just had a long way to go... at this point i hadn't given myself any time to write... i wanted to play so bad that i couldn't wait around on the songs part... these are like pencil drawings waiting on some ink... crumpled up bits of paper thrown into the corner of a room... i am glad that this tape survived all those years... hazy as it sounds it's still a pretty good record of where my mind was at... scary as that seems now...